When it comes to home computer document management Nuance’s Paperport is it. Perhaps there are alternatives, so far I haven’t seen one. I use PaperPort 11, but a newer version, Paperport 12, is available.

Paperport is a tool for handling a variety of documents in different formats and sizes. It often comes bundled with scanners – and is designed from the ground up to work with them.

In use Paperport acts like an overlay on top of Windows’ folder structure. You view document thumbnails laid out on the screen. Usually Paperport’s display shows the first page of multiple-page documents, but unlike Windows, you can scroll through the pages without opening the thumbnail.

You can store documents in several formats – Paperport recognises all the common ones. But changing formats and using Paperport documents is straightforward.

Paperport automatically generates a row of application icons along the bottom of its display based on the programs installed on your computer. On my computer the icons include the main Microsoft Office applications along with Ominpage, Photoshop, Acrobat, FTP and others.

When you move a document thumbnail on one of these icons, the application opens allowing you to word on the document. For example, moving a PDF to the Outlook icon allows you to email the document and moving, say, a Tiff document to the Omnipage icon cranks up its optical character recognition engine.

These days it makes sense to store most electronic documents as PDFs – the format is the widely accepted standard. Paperport comes with a built-in PDF conversion utility which does the job smoothly and efficiently – generally there’s little need for human intervention.

If you’ve a huge amount of documents to scan, it’s possible to let Paperport automatically improve images. It can straighten them and adjust colour and contrast, sharpen and remove red-eye from photographs. Even though I’ve scanned a stored more than 1,000 documents I’ve avoided this automation because it can introduce errors. Instead I tweak images manually as I enter them.

The bad stuff: I’ve found the program a little buggy at times – it can crash and burn without warning. Yet it never loses a huge amount of work when this happens. In addition, there’s an annoying registration reminder application loaded on to your computer – which can cause problems with Windows. It takes a while to learn how to get the best out of the application.

Another gripe is poor support – the Nuance web site has few answers to the problems I saw and there’s not a vibrant and vocal community of users to call on when in need of help.

Overall: As far as I know, there’s not low-level alternative to Paperport, so if you need home document management this is it. The application does what I need, is a productivity booster and is a powerful tool despite its annoyances.

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Scanning and stitching pages and stories from old broadsheet newspapers has long been a problem.

I’ve been a newspaper journalist for most of the past 30 years. My story portfolio is largely a pile of yellowing paper, that is now fraying around the edges. There’s enough to fill three filing cabinet drawers.

Clearly my hoard is a prime candidate for scanning and digital storage. Yet it’s not easy turning broadsheet newspaper pages into .pdfs or .jpgs. Most home office flatbed scanners are A4 size or maybe fractionally larger. They rarely scan a whole newspaper story in a single go and full pages are out of the question.

You can scan and store pages in sections, but converting from, say, The Sydney Morning Herald, into six overlapping A4 pdfs is clumsy.

And the saved documents aren’t much use for anything.

Software stitching

It’s possible to use applications like Adobe Photoshop or Gimp to stitch photographs together, so in theory they should do the same with newspaper pages. In practice the job is tricky, although I’m told recent versions of Photoshop do a better job.

There are specialist programs able to piece together overlapping images to form bigger documents. Photographers use them to create panoramas. Most are optimised for photos not printed pages, but I came across ArcSoft’s Scan n Stich which automates the task making it easy.

I’d give ArcSoft 9 our of ten for ease of use and practicality. There are two versions of the program. I’ve previously used the US$20 Standard Edition to deal with magazine and tabloid newspaper pages in my portfolio. The program whizzed through the task producing stunning results. I also use Nuance’s PaperPort to organise scanned documents and the same company’s OmniPage to handle optical character recognition so I have both text documents of my old stories and facsimile pdfs.

To scan my broadsheet pages, I’d need to shell out a further US$40 to ArcSoft for its Scan n Stich Deluxe version. I’ve no philosophical objections to paying for software to do this kind of job, but a very practical one; I don’t use credit cards making it hard for me to buy software online.

Free alternative

So I needed to cast around for either something available from local retailers or a free downloadable alternative. I wasn’t too optimistic and started bracing myself for a lot

of Photoshop work. On the other hand, I could just hang on to the paper.

Luckily a friend told me about Image Composite Editor (also known as ICE) from Microsoft Research. It’s a free downloadable program which appears designed for photographic images but brilliantly melded six A4 scans into a single broadsheet-sized document.

ICE is on version 1.2r1 and has been since November 2008, so it’s clearly not a priority for the world’s largest software company. There are a few rough edges and barely anything in the way of documentation, but hey, it not only gets the job done, it does things quickly.

Best of all the application is simple to use. You simply drag and drop images in any order on the main Window and let the program do its stuff. One complication is that you’ll need to have roughly 20 percent overlap between the various pages – but this would be standard in any stitching application.

When you’ve finished there’s a basic crop tool and the option to export the completed image in a several formats.

I had to play around a little with the images to get the best output. My scans were initially black and whites – it was hard to get the contrast level right and some text was always left unread. My scanner software has an enhanced text mode, but I didn’t use this for the composite image instead opting for greyscale images captured at a potentially unnecessarily high 400 dots per inch resolution. The results looked more like photo images, which seemed to help with the stitching.

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